The scrapbooks scanned on this Flickrsite are the property of Mary Lou and Dave Ryan. By placing these on the internet, reseachers will be able to follow the daily flow of the war in the Pacific, as well as North Africa and Europe. The scans will for the most part be the uncorrected original images in the condition they are this year. Mary Lou and Dave will provide more detail about the source of the scrapbooks. I hope I live long enough to get them all scanned. There are a ton of them.

 

It is exactly 12:41 AM Monday, May 12, 2008 and I've just finished scanning and posting the last page in the last of the 18 scrapbooks kept by our World War II mystery lady from Youngstown, Ohio. There were exactly 18 scrapbooks in all. Most of them had between 60 and 70 pages. Two of them had either 100 or over 100 pages.

 

When I began the project I knew I had just one crack at these one of a kind treasures. Number one, they're very fragile and the damage done to the books in the scanning process should not be done but once. A little of rotten paper is left all around when someone merely looks through the pages. From now on people should look through them only on the internet. Secondly the volume of work is so huge I would dread having to do it again. At any rate I decided to try several things and to be thorough.

 

I've scanned EVERYTHING. If our mystery lady used fold ups on the pages, I unfolded them and scanned all visual possibilities. Where possible I've even scanned the backs of clippings. I would imagine the price of a can of tomato soup in 1941 is of interest to someone. I was intrigued to find a price on one of the 50 page scrapbooks...10 cents. Realizing someone's grandfather may have owned a publishing company that specialized in scrapbooks from that era, i even scanned the scrapbook covers.

 

Thanks to my son, Michael, I have a scanner that will scan up to about 13 x 18 inches, so I was able to scan each scrapbook page without having to patch anything together. My scanner is an Epson. The last three scrapbooks were scanned and not modified in any way for the most part. I even tried to leave a small white border around each pages so the pattern of disintegration could be studied.

 

On the first 15 scrapbooks, however, I used Paint Shop Pro XI to clean up a lot of the aging and enhance the photographic and artistic images.

 

All in all, it's been a labor of love and I've enjoyed every minute of it. My memory of that era was that very little news was given to the people, so it was with amazement that I read these pages and realized there was almost total information sharing between the government agencies and the general public.

 

I guess the difference is in that day and age we were All in it together.

 

Now, the scrapbooks are all bound in plastic covers and put back into their box away from light and air. Now all I have to do is take David and Mary Lou to dinner and return their property.

 

As an update. Dave and Mary Lou have been unable to find out anything about the mystery lady who kept these scrapbooks. The person the got them from didn't have a clue. I've contacted important people at the Youngstown Vindicator and found no one with any interest, even though their paper was a part an interest piece of poignant history. Things today are just too exciting to worry about something like a global war and the people who lived it. So it goes.

 

As an afterthought. I know anyone can order microfilmed copies of the newspapers from those years and if you have the patience and time to wade through all the pages of every daily paper, fine. The scrapbooks are here for the high school student doing an essay on D-Day or perhaps the Battle of the Bulge. The source of information is right there at the laptop and it's already organized for a speedy search.

 

Go in peace.

 

But, we'll keep looking.

 

Carlton Biermann permitted me to post his copy of the Dec. 8, 1941 San Antonio Light. This paper is still in mint condition. The scans will testify to that and the paper was laminated very early on. This convinces me that if you really want to preserve the APPEARANCE of a document, lamination is the way to go.

 

Here's another interesting site concerning Nazi military prison camps and "The Great Excape."

   

Subject: The Tunnel that made The Great Escape possible

 

When graphics appear, move cursor over the number (no need to click) to display an explanation of activity.

 

Make sure you take the tour. It's really something to see.

 

This may be one of the most amazing e-mails I've seen. The last number to 'roll over' is 16. Be sure to look and read the numbers and click 'next' to move along.

 

In 1943 work had begun on 'Harry', the tunnel that allowed over 70 men to escape from the German POW camp, 'Stalag III', during World War II. This was the same tunnel made famous by the movie 'The Great Escape'. The URL below takes you to a site where one of the men, after the War, drew a diagram with explanations of each of the sections.

 

It's amazing how accurate the movie was, even though it couldn't possibly include all the information involved in this great engineering feat. Hope you find this as interesting as I did.

 

www.kerman94.com/tunnelharry.html